Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Videos!

Thanks to my wonderful traveling friend Phil, all the videos that I've taken thus far have been posted on my youtube account (megansings414). Here's one for your enjoyment - there are many others from the Red Rose Christmas party, my house, the University and a few randoms if you visit here.

This video and a future post (promise!) are all thanks to Bev and Sheryl from Expanding Opportunities - who invited me to join on an art tour over the last two weeks to visit the artisans around Kenya that they work with to support their children's home and other projects. We were also joined by Holly Elzinga, whose website Our Fair Earth is definitely worth checking out for wonderful fair trade products (she does wholesale and design work too!). All inspiring ladies who are using their many talents to help women and children explore both their education and creative potential. I also enjoyed getting to know a young woman named Rachel who has just moved over here to live and volunteer with the boys at the Expanding Opportunities children's home. As I got to know her a bit and see her excitement for the work she will do I felt like I was re-living my experience in South Africa and it made me miss Nkandla and the kids there tremendously. She is in for a wonderful, humbling, challenging and life changing experience - these boys are blessed to have her.

I am still struggling to capture in words the reality of daily newspaper headlines about a government-created food shortage, stories of children with nothing but green mangoes to eat, the still-bleeding sore on a small child's knee left by the woman supposed to care for him or the tears Rachel cried (tears I know well) as we left a struggling school and the young boy who had attached himself to her hip during our short visit. It's as if I am in a new stage of observation, awareness, absorption and renewal. There are moments in every day when the reality of the situation around me makes my heart so heavy I want to pack it in and go home. There are just as many, if not more, moments where I come across people like the women I traveled with for the last two weeks, actively opening their hearts to the stories of people in need - even when they can't help...or getting to know my professors, who have lived through colonization and independence and even with the myriad of information that points to failure, corruption, backwards development and the horrendous inequities in the global system that affect this country, come to class every day ready to inspire and challenge us to SEEK A SOLUTION.

I will never get used to coming from plenty when living amongst little. Sometimes the process is heavier than others - and I fear that to delve into it here too much would betray the beauty and blessing of this experience as a whole. At the same time, (and I'm sure I'm repeating myself), I feel called to share the story of this experience and all that it entails, even when it's not pretty. Thank you for giving me the space and encouragement to do this, and hopefully there will be bits of hope that come through in my words, photos and the voices of those around me that I can share by way of videos and stories.